| Description |
xvi, 159 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm |
| Contents |
Introduction: Shot - Reverse Shot -- Pt. 1. Rethinking Paradigms. 1. Methodologies: Who's Seeing Whom: Representation and Identification. 2. Melodrama and Women -- Pt. 2. Weimar Contexts and Texts. 3. The Weimar Years: The Weimar Republic and Weimar Cinema. 4. The Street Rules: The Weimar Street Film and The Street. 5. Female Desire: The Variegated Nature of Desire in Variety. 6. Female Agency and Its Lack -- Pt. 3. Film Noir Contexts and Texts. 7. The Noir Years: U.S. War and Postwar Culture and Cinema, 1941-1958. 8. The Stuff of Dreams: Film Noir and The Maltese Falcon. 9. Why Do You Have to Murder People? The Femme Fatale and Femme Attrapee in Gun Crazy. 10. Film Noir Traps All Femmes: All Women Are Femmes Fatales in The Big Heat -- Pt. 4. Pasts and Presents. 11. Reflections: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir. 12. Noir Now: U.S. Retro-Noir, German Neo-Noir, U.S. Neo-Noir |
| Summary |
Both film noir and the Weimar street film hold a continuing fascination for film spectators and film theorists alike. The female characters, especially the alluring femmes fatales, remain a focus for critical and popular attention. The antithesis of the femme fatale, which Wager calls the femme attrapee, has received considerably less notice. Unlike most theorists, Jans Wager examines these archetypes from the perspective of the female spectator and rejects the persistence of vision that allows a reading of these female characters only as representations of unstable postwar masculinity. Instead, she suggests that the woman in the audience has always seen and understood these characters as representations of some aspect of her own existence |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 135-148) and index |
| Subject |
Femmes fatales in motion pictures.
|
|
Film noir -- Germany -- History and criticism.
|
|
Film noir -- United States -- History and criticism.
|
|
Street films -- Germany -- History and criticism.
|
| LC no. |
98049586 |
| ISBN |
0821412701 (cloth : alk. paper) |
|
